From the moment we humans became aware of our mortality, we’ve been fixated on the idea of defying it. The Bible describes patriarchs who lived for centuries, Greek mythology tells of the eternally aging Tithonus, and modern sci-fi features innumerable characters who simply refuse to die. The concept has transcended fiction into the realms of medicine, exploration, and pseudoscience. Europe’s medieval alchemists spent centuries searching for an immortality-granting philosopher’s stone, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León hunted for a fountain of youth, and French surgeon Serge Voronoff transplanted monkey testicles onto Parisian men in an attempt to restore their youthful vitality.
For centuries, the quest for immortality had largely led only to dead ends, but recent discoveries in genetics and cellular biology hint that we may finally be approaching genuine progress — a shift embodied this spring at Vitalist Bay, an eight-week longevity event in Berkeley, California. There, hundreds of prominent speakers from across the science, business, and art of longevity — including some of those at the vanguard of these breakthroughs — gathered with thousands of anti-aging enthusiasts to toss around provocative ideas for how far, and how fast, they can push human life.
Extended warranty
In the Bible’s book of Psalms, Moses tells his followers that “the days of our lives may come to 70 years, or perhaps 80 if our strength endures.” Today, approximately three millennia later, the average human lifespan remains 72 years. Moses, God’s chosen prophet, was lucky enough to last until 120, according to the book of Deuteronomy. The oldest person to ever live by modern accounting, French supercentenarian Jeanne Calment, died in 1997 at age 122.
Humans have made remarkable progress in extending our average lifespans by quelling the plagues that used to strike us down while we were young. Yet we have had little luck moving the needle for how and when we become old. Infant mortality rates have plummeted, fewer men and women are killed in war, famines strike the bellies of smaller portions of humanity, but we can still expect our health to rapidly deteriorate across our 70s, 80s, and 90s like clockwork, just as in the time of Moses. Our biological ceiling for life has remained stubbornly unchanging.
Longevity advocates like science blogger Tim Urban remain optimistic that this may not always be the case. Urban has encouraged his readers to adopt the view that our bodies are simply machines, and like any other contraptions, time and use slow their processes, break down their components, and jumble the information that guides their operations. That makes aging nothing more than a challenge of restorative engineering. Researchers just need to figure out exactly what goes wrong in our bodies as we age, and then — with the right combination of money and manpower — we might be able to prevent and even reverse the degeneration.
“It’s weird that the human body has a limit on years,” Urban told me shortly after giving a Vitalist Bay main stage lecture on the peculiarity of the modern scientific age that referenced everything from AI to, of course, anti-aging research. “You can have a lot of 90-year-olds who are doing great — sharp and able — and every one of them is going to be dead in 30 years. There’s not any one of the eight billion people [on Earth] that is 160.”
While the crowds at Vitalist Bay seemed to take this biomechanical view of aging as a given, some attendees shared their frustration that the perspective has only recently punctured its way into the mainstream. “When I came into academic gerontology, radical life extension was something that nobody in the field would ever talk about,” biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who was among the first academics to advocate for large-scale longevity research nearly 30 years ago, told me. “If you went anywhere near that idea, you would never get funded. It’s become a more acceptable thing to talk about simply because I’ve been making such a nuisance of myself all these years.”
In addition to conducting multi-pronged laboratory anti-aging research, de Grey had dedicated time in recent decades to advocating for both the viability and moral necessity of experimentation into lifespan extension on media outlets such as TED, “60 Minutes,” and “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Given the number of curious laypeople in attendance at Vitalist Bay, it seems his publicity work has borne fruit — multiple conference speakers gave pointed thanks to de Grey for his contributions to the field of anti-aging, both scientific and social.
While nonchalant about his subcultural celebrity, de Grey acknowledges his role in pulling the possibility of lifespan extension closer to the mainstream. “I started with the indisputable fact that the body is a machine, and that means that we should be able to extend — and indeed transcend — the warranty period of the body in just the same way that we do for any man-made machines, like cars or airplanes,” he told me. “It took me a few years to realize that this was all everybody was missing from their perspective on aging. But when I did realize it, the rest was history.”
Forever on a budget
Based on the crowds at Vitalist Bay, longevity appears to be among the hottest topics of discourse in the Bay Area, the global epicenter for technology and innovation. At Lighthaven, the five-building campus that served as the event’s setting, a who’s who of popular science communicators, like de Grey and Urban, mingled with big-name biotech CEOs, curious college students, and bookish digital nomads. The tech-minded throngs debated topics like the viability of cryonics and the ethics of selling unregulated longevity drugs to your friends.
One of the conference’s most anticipated speakers was celebrity biohacker Bryan Johnson, who had recently released a Netflix documentary centered on his multimillion-dollar supplement-fueled quest to live forever. Johnson looked like a rock star as he walked onto the Vitalist Bay campus, surrounded by a pack composed mostly of attractive women.
But despite the growing cultural appeal of longevity science, the sum of investment flowing into the field still lags far behind what will likely be needed to make any meaningful impact on the length of our lives. “Eighty or so longevity startups have attracted about $10–$15 billion dollars in funding — that’s still really small,” Nathan Cheng, one of the two co-founders of Vitalist Bay, grumbled from the main stage. “To give context, if you look at total startup funding for biotech from 2017 to 2021, longevity research was only about 3% of that funding.”
This is despite aging causing more than 80% of deaths in the Western world, if one attributes age-related morbidities, like heart disease and dementia, directly to aging. “The field is just so small relative to the size of the problem we are trying to deal with,” said Cheng.
For any startups lucky enough to capture a share of that shallow resource pool, though, the path to a serious medical breakthrough is beginning to peek over the horizon. “I’m an optimistic person,” said Kristen Fortney, CEO of BioAge, a startup using genetic data from long-living humans to develop therapies that target metabolic diseases. “Ten years ago, there were very few companies actually working on aging. Now there’s a real trend. People are talking about longevity.”
Just as the similarly nascent fields of AI and gene editing were ignited by the respective discoveries of transformers and CRISPR, the academic field of aging biology took off with a single watershed discovery. “Pre-1990s, people thought that aging was just too complicated because all these different things go wrong,” said Fortney. “That tune changed a bit when Cynthia Kenyon and Gary Ruvkun showed that you could delete a single gene in a worm and double its lifespan.” The worms with the induced mutation not only lived longer, but also looked younger and healthier than their nonmutated counterparts. “Simple change, big result — maybe [aging is] a bit simpler than we think,” said Fortney.
Unfortunately, the worms that Kenyon and Ruvkun studied have about 100 million genomic base pairs. Humans have about 3.2 billion such pairs, and the process of transposing the duo’s results to people has been sluggish, at best. “The current state of affairs is that, in 2025, we still have no approved interventions or therapies for aging,” said Cheng on stage at Vitalist Bay.
Part of this is because the talent and funding that has come into the longevity field has been neither plentiful nor evenly distributed. “Partial reprogramming has definitely taken the lion’s share of longevity’s resources,” Cheng told the Vitalist Bay audience, in reference to the process of chemically de-aging cells without reverting them all the way back into stem cells. The technique has been a hotbed of research since 2016, when scientists at the Salk Institute showed they could use it to extend the lifespans of mice by 30%, while also ameliorating some of the rodents’ physical signs of aging. The promise of this process has become a catalyst for numerous biotech startups, including Altos Labs, Calico Labs, and Retro Biosciences, with funding coming from name-brand billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman.
But the focus on reprogramming has left other potential age-reversal modalities almost entirely unfunded. “Nobody seems to really care about techniques like DNA repair or extracellular matrix,” said Cheng, referring to research that looks within the cell and beyond it, respectively.
Apollo for aging
For some longevity advocates at Vitalist Bay, the scale of research required to solve aging remains far too grand for venture capital to tackle alone. “I think you need government-scale investment,” Andrew Steele, scientist and author of the book “Ageless,” told me. “We need to put in probably tens to low hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Unsurprisingly, the US government’s expenditure on aging research currently falls well short of Steele’s quote. “The actual amount of government money going into aging biology is about $300 to $400 million a year,” he said. “That means roughly $1 per American. Aging kills about 85% of people in the US, and yet we’re spending $1 per person per year trying to sort it out.”
“What we want to do is bring people here so we can actually spark a civilizational effort, something like an Apollo program.”
Nathan Cheng
If $100 billion sounds like an exorbitant government price tag for an as-of-yet theoretical medical modality, the market value of doing nothing could be far more astronomical. “At the end of the day, aging is extremely costly,” said Cheng, using a graph projected onto a large screen atop the Vitalist Bay main stage to back up his points. “This is a chart showing the total projected Medicare and Medicaid expenditure for treating Alzheimer’s disease, a single age-related disease. It’s projected to be over a trillion dollars by 2050. There’s definitely a cost to aging.”
The US currently wastes approximately 10% of its annual GDP on a whack-a-mole approach to restraining chronic, largely age-related diseases, like cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. If it invested in anti-aging research, it could potentially prevent these diseases from ever infiltrating our bodies in the first place. That could not only save money in the long run, but also prevent suffering.
This brings us to the real purpose of Vitalist Bay and initiatives like it, which gather many of the field’s most prominent voices on a single plot of land: to establish an active pro-lifespan constituency that can lobby governments to take the longevity movement seriously. “What we want to do is bring people here so we can actually spark a civilizational effort, something like an Apollo program,” said Cheng. “That’s why we’re all here today, to come together and see what we can do to actually push this forward at the highest level and make this society’s number one priority.”
“We still have a long way to go to be comparable in size to something like oncology, where there’s hundreds of biotech companies and clinical programs,” said Fortney. “That’s the future that I want for this space.”
“I think we need to get better as a community at talking to governments, talking to policy makers, talking to normal people, and explaining to them what longevity science is.”
Andrew Steele
To do that, the nascent longevity movement will need to combat widespread ambivalence toward the idea of a radically longer life — and that could prove more difficult than actually developing effective anti-aging treatment. Our most fabulous longevity narratives make for both great storytelling and a frightening prospective reality. It’s likely where much of the pushback against longevity research germinates. So much of our mythmaking around longevity has framed lifespan extension not only as fantastical fiction, but also a gift that must inevitably come with a catch. Immortality cost Dorian Gray his soul. Trojan prince Tithonus got eternal life, but didn’t read the fine print and was doomed to suffer frailty and illness for all of eternity.
Real-world examples of people pursuing a longer life don’t make it seem any less out there. “I think we need to get better as a community at talking to governments, talking to policy makers, talking to normal people, and explaining to them what longevity science is,” Steele told me. “A lot of them think it’s just about billionaires trying to live forever, or they think it’s about crazy biohackers taking a million supplements a day.”
According to Steele and many of the most sober minds I encountered at Vitalist Bay, real progress in longevity, when it comes, will be far less dramatic. It’ll transpire in the background of our lives, creeping into our routines via our diets, daily medications, and fully forgettable outpatient procedures. It’ll also be far less sudden than what we’ve seen in fiction — no one is going to become immortal overnight.
Instead, longevity will likely come to us as imperceptibly minute additions to the average number of candles occupying our birthday cakes, the slow-growing share of children who have a chance to meet their great-grandparents, the burgeoning portion of us dying peacefully in our beds after long and largely healthy lives. If these changes do occur, we will hopefully adapt to them without fuss or even without notice.
And then, one day in the future, our descendants might look back on those of us living today and wonder why more of us weren’t at Vitalist Bay, fighting for our chance to live as long as they do.
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